India not to send military contingent to China for multi-national parade

By skipping the event, Western leaders are attempting to signal their displeasure with what they see as Chinese aggression in the East and South China Seas.

What Seoul needs most from Beijing is its support to pave the way to lasting peace and unification of the Korean Peninsula.

The continued efforts to sustain and advance this security cooperation suggest that, despite growing Sino-Japanese strategic rivalry, defence relations could get back on track if they are carefully managed by policymakers of both countries. China and Korea neither forgot nor forgave Japan for these incidents. The two countries are closer than ever.

Third, this event would have offered an opportunity for an ice-breaking meeting between President Park and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, had he made a decision to come.

Japan also started feeling the heat of the advancing threat of colonialism, especially after the opium war was unjustly imposed on China by the British in 1839.

The parade will also involve modern tanks and missile-launchers, state media has reported.

Consequently, on March 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry of the US Navy, who had earlier failed in his expedition, used coercive military force to “persuade” the Japanese government to give in to the US’s wishes. As the whole world will be watching, Beijing is believed to emphasize China’s contribution to the Allied defeat of Japan, show off growing military strength to demonstrate its status as a rising world power. It wants its allies to follow its lead and not attend the parade.

Washington is especially concerned about the timing of the parade.

The 2 x 48-minute special was coproduced by Infocus Asia and China global Communication Centre and aired to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. Especially during the six-week invasion of Nanking in late 1937, the Japanese army reportedly murdered hundreds of thousands of people, including civilians, and sexually assaulted between 20,000 to 80,000 women. The United States “rebalance” toward Asia is significantly complicated if two of its key allies there are not getting along.

“[Chinese president] Xi Jinping simply cannot afford to seem that he’s not absolutely in management, absolutely in cost, and assured”, Steve Tsang, a senior fellow within the China Coverage Institute on the College of Nottingham, . But China-DPRK relations have been weakening and Pyongyang does not take Beijing’s advice seriously these days. Indeed the geostrategic ramifications of this new triumvirate may well replace some functions of the existing trilateral alliance of Japan, South Korea and the US.